Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism::Tesla founder threatens to take action against media watchdog ‘the split second court opens on Monday’
Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism::Tesla founder threatens to take action against media watchdog ‘the split second court opens on Monday’
Ok look The Independent, I know that the company says he’s a founder and Wikipedia lists him as a founder, but he’s not. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded the company almost a full year before Musk had anything to do with it. He had to sue them to add his name to the list officially.
Does it? I expected better of Wikipedia, so I checked, and both Musk’s page and Tesla’s avoid simply listing him as a founder by explaining the situation, i.e., that he was an early investor. Even the sidebar for Tesla, Inc. just links to a subsection rather than listing names.
Just a note to add, addressing a related talking point that inevitably comes up:
It’s a very common piece of misinformation that he was determined to be a founder in a court of law. That never happened. It was part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. It’s a lie that the relevant parties could all live with as part of a larger settlement.
I like to ask Musk apologists, “Do you need to found a company to be that company’s founder, yes or no?” If they waffle or say “no,” there’s no point continuing in good faith, because they’re not serious people. It’s not hard to say “Okay, that’s a bit of a fib, he should be called an honorary founder, but blah blah blah…” But if they can’t even do that, then they aren’t operating based on reality.
Only here:
Which I agree is sort of showing the trick and explaining how it’s done all at once. But I wanted to give the headline writer a little bit of the benefit of the doubt that they actually looked it up somewhere other than on the Tesla website.
But what is reality? Is it vijñapti-mātra?
I will respond to this by asking “is registering the name of a company the only thing that counts when founding a company?”
Because that’s what the original founders did. They registered the name. No patents, no designs, no engineering, no staff. They registered the name, then went searching for VC money.
That’s a terrible argument. As if the idea and pitch aren’t relevant in any way. For a preschool example of this, check out Shark Tank. You might have heard of it?
No, it’s not a terrible argument. Anyone can have a pitch or idea. That does not mean it’s automatically a viable product/service or a viable business.
It’s a valid question, how do we define “founder”? To play devil’s advocate, I’m curious if the people who think Musk didn’t co-found Tesla also agree Aaron Schwartz didn’t co-found Reddit. He joined later, after reddit was already incorporated by Hoffman and Ohanian.
In business, “founder” is already an honorary title. It has no inherent power. Co-founders often ensure they get C-suite positions as a company grows, have stock/shares, or other legal powers, but none of those are guaranteed just by being a “founder”. So practically, there’s no difference between calling Musk a “co-founder” versus “honorary co-founder.” Let’s just focus on calling him a piece of shit for the very definitive and obvious things we can point to.
If the pitch is made and a VC opts in but doesn’t negotiate a title, then they aren’t privvy to the title of co-founder only after the concept is proven sound. Either you’re a founder or you’re not.
*edit to add visual
The godaddied Tesla?
Ok, it sounds like you’re trying real hard to split hairs.
Not just the company itself and Wikipedia say so, but legally, he is a founder. That was the outcome of the lawsuit.
It’s true that the first 2 founders legally registered the corporate entity known as “Tesla Motors”. Then for the next year, they didn’t do jack shit involving anything automotive… they were just going around looking for investors.
Musk was basically their first, and biggest, investor. They didn’t actually hire any engineers or, you know, actually start doing anything until Musk’s money came into play.
This is the entire argument Musk made in court, and honestly I don’t think I care. Tarpenning and Eberhard are both engineers with actual inventions and software attributed to their direct design long before the idea of Tesla; Eberhard wrote the company’s mission statement and guiding principles, and the two did the market research to discover that an electric vehicle could be a high-end consumer product. At its core, before the battery technology and stators were invented (neither of which Musk contributed to), that’s what Tesla was.
While it’s true that Musk led development on the Roadster, I think we’ve seen very publicly over the past year what his “development leadership” looks like and I’m not entirely convinced it’s a value-add. (Even before his disastrous year with Twitter, his checkered past leading Paypal—and being forced out for his poor leadership—would give a similar impression.) He didn’t come up with the battery tech or the stators. He didn’t contribute to a single patent in the early days of Tesla. In fact, that first design of the Roadster probably owed more to Lotus Motors than to Musk himself.
It appears that he did with the Roadster, and the early years at Tesla, what he always does when leading product development: jump into an existing idea, make wild assertions and insistences, let the actual engineers figure out how to do it, and then justify a reason to exclude stuff when it turns out to be unfeasible. He did this demonstrably with SpaceX, Hyperloop, Boring Company, PayPal/Zip2, and now Twitter, and he’s done it demonstrably at Tesla with the Cybertruck, so I don’t know why it would be a surprise that he did it twenty years ago at Tesla too. He doesn’t invent things or lead teams, he just makes noise and bluster.
Which just leaves the money. And would you credit a really loud bank with “founding” a company?
I wouldn’t.